Notes about the DroboFS

A week or two ago, I picked up a DroboFS network-attached storage unit. I picked it up because I need to store a few terabytes of data-- backups of music and movies that I own, personal files, and so forth.

From my perspective, there are a number of nice things abut the DroboFS:

It uses very little power-- 15W at rest, and about 60W when working.
It lets me access my files from any device in the house, via a CIFS share.
It can handle hard drives of varying sizes-- unlike, say, RAID-based solutions

These advantages are balanced by a few disadvantages:

The I/O bandwidth is not that great. I seem to get around 20MB/s on my gigabit ethernet network.
There is no officially supported web UI, and the configuration programs they provide are only for Windows and Macintosh (no Linux).
I had to learn how to configure it, which took an hour or two.

No Web UI

When I was buying this thing, I honestly did not consider the possibility that there would be no web UI. It's 2012-- everything is supposed to have a web UI these days. It is true that in order to use a web UI, you'd have to know the IP address, which might be difficult for non-technical users to determine. However, it would be easy enough to have a native program which just searches for all the Drobos on your subnet, and gives you a link to the web UI for each. The fact that they didn't do this is just lame.

The Design

I can't help but feel that there is something vaguely Apple-ish about the design. They clearly spent a lot of time on the "out-of-the-box" experience, using high-quality packaging materials, designer styling on the box, and so forth. I guess maybe every consumer electronics manufacturer feels like they have to do this nowadays? I don't know.

I miss the days when computers felt like power tools, delivered with thick manuals and made out of solid metal and wood. Nowadays, computers feel like fasion accessories. I guess the world has moved on from those early days.

Setup

I guess I might as well include some actual useful information on this page. My setup steps were something like this:

Install Drobo configuration software for Windows. They call this the "Dashboard."
Plug in the the Drobo and locate it with the Dashboard.
Add a hard drive to the Drobo and verify that it was successfully added on the Dashboard.
Set an administrator password on the Dashboard
Set up the CIFS share on the Dashboard, and verify that I could mount it. I encourage you to disable any world-accessible shares, unless you really, really feel like you need them.

After this brief configuration is done, you don't need the Windows software any more-- as long as everything is working.

Enabling Symlinks

If you are a Linux user like myself, you're probably going to notice that the Drobo, by default, does not support symlinks. This was really annoying for me.

You can fix this, but it requires a little bit of work.

Enable "Drobo Apps" on the Drobo Dashboard.
Mount the CIFS share named DroboApps
Copy the dropbear tarred gzip (.tgz) file to the root directory of the DroboApps share.
Restart the Drobo.
ssh into the Drobo with user: root, password: root
For the love of God, change the root password to something other than "root" by running /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/dropbear/root_passwd (yeah, I know-- exactly the command you expected to use for this, right?)
Edit /etc/.backup_smb.conf and add these lines to the end:
follow symlinks = yes wide links = no case sensitive = yes unix extensions = yes
A basic version of the vi editor is provided.
Restart the drobo. The easiest way to do this is from the Dashboard.

The DroboFS uses Samba to serve its CIFS shares. There have been some security vulnerabilities associated with symlinks on Samba. That's the reason why they are turned off by default. Personally, I don't care about this, because I don't give out the password to my CIFS shares to anyone but friends and family. If those people wanted to hack my computer, they could just walk over and insert a boot CD. No need for symlink shenanigans.

If you are deploying your DroboFS in a corporate environment, or another environment where you need security, you probably should not enable symlinks. I'm not sure how suitable the DroboFS is for the corporate environment in the first place, but that's another discussion. You have been warned.

Also note that even after applying this fix, you still won't be able to use abslute paths in symlinks. This is samba's fault-- you can't enable both "wide links" and "unix extensions" without recompiling the program, which is a lot more work that I really want to do. This was also done in the name of security. Anyway, using absolute paths in links on a CIFS share is probably not a good idea anyway.

The Future

I hope that in the future, I'll be able to buy an ARM server running Linux that will have very low power consumption, rather than a single-purpose device. I'd like to believe that companies like Drobo would be happy to sell me this kind of hardware, while allowing me to run open source storage software like HDFS, Ceph, or nfsd on it. Until that happy day, Drobo seems to be working pretty well for my current needs.